


We’ll Have to Muddle Through Somehow

by OldShrewsburyian



Series: Time's a strange fellow [2]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: (because everyone has broken pasts and also they're in a bunker: nothing's perfect), (it does have an arc though), Because of Reasons, Christmas Eve, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Movies, Christmas Tree, Confessions, Everybody Lives, Families of Choice, Friendship/Love, Gen, It's a Wonderful Life, Light Angst, No Plot/Plotless, No Sex, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 02, Some Humor, Team as Family, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Unresolved Romantic Tension, You Have Been Warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 04:44:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14887886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: No, I don't know why I'm writing Christmas fic in June. But I love these characters, and I love the series finale's suggestion of them as a family. So here's the Time Team, celebrating Christmas, at some point post-s2 and Rufus' inevitable rescue.





	We’ll Have to Muddle Through Somehow

**Author's Note:**

> I have taken the canon evidence that Lucy turns to "It Happened One Night" as comfort viewing as license to make her an Old Hollywood nerd.

“You would not _believe_ ,” says Agent Christopher, entering the bunker, “how many grocery stores I had to go to to find all this.”

Wyatt, Jiya, and Rufus look dutifully chastened; Jiya even shuffles her feet a little. It is Wyatt who breaks first, grinning. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Flynn materializes behind them and relieves the FBI agent of her shopping bags. “Ordinarily,” says Denise, raising her voice so he can’t pretend not to hear her, “I’d object on principle, but those things weigh a ton. I got the yams you wanted, Rufus.”

“We really appreciate it.”

“We do,” choruses Jiya.

Figuring out the logistics of having three enthusiastic cooks preparing three distinct cuisines in a kitchen the size of the bunker’s is a task assigned to Mason, as neutral party and engineering genius. On the afternoon of December 24th, he sits finalizing the schedule and the maps for the next day, while Lucy chops vegetables. She has been firmly told that this is all she will be allowed to do in the kitchen. There is a heaviness in the air; no one is particularly cheerful.

“‘It’s a Wonderful Life’!” says Jiya suddenly.

“It’s _what_?” says Flynn incredulously, and Lucy has to bite her lip to hold back laughter. 

“I mean we should watch it.” Jiya rolls her eyes at him theatrically.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t _seen_ it.” Rufus looks up from where he is tinkering with the insides of a salvaged keyboard. 

Flynn gives a sigh suggesting the tiresomeness of anticipating the preoccupations of ordinary mortals. Jiya responds by shoving him in the shoulder. “Hey,” she says severely. “You might at least pretend you noticed that.”

“Oh.” The corners of Flynn’s mouth are folded down in suppressed mirth. “Sorry.”

Lucy shakes her head, a gesture of surrender, and stands up. “I’ll get my computer.” As she leaves the common room, she hears Jiya enthusing, presumably in Flynn’s direction:

“You’ll love it! It has time travel!” This is, Lucy supposes, technically true. Sort of.

“Double feature with ‘Shop Around the Corner’?” she suggests, on returning, and receives blank stares in return. “It’s like ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ but with Jimmy Stewart and Christmas in it.” 

“Like what?”

“Oh my god, Jiya, how can you be so _young_? I’m telling Denise.”

“You’re all appallingly young,” says Mason, without looking up from his papers, “and some of us are trying to do advanced mathematics.”

“Let’s,” says, of all people, Flynn.

“I’ll make hot chocolate,” says Wyatt, and ignores Flynn muttering something that sounds suspiciously like _it’s called cocoa_.

With the other members of the party otherwise occupied, Lucy, Jiya, and Flynn — definitely in that order — get the contested places on the couch. Lucy wonders briefly if she pulled Jiya down into the middle seat with too-obvious haste, and then decides she doesn’t care. 

“This was directed by Ernst Lubitsch,” says Lucy, as the film opens on Hollywood’s version of 1930s Budapest.

“Wow,” deadpans Wyatt, handing her a mug of hot chocolate, “that’s really something. Can’t believe I’ve never seen it.” She swats at him; he dodges, exaggerating the movement. They all settle into the film’s gentle drama, the conflict over music boxes and leather wallets, irritable banter giving way to embarrassed tenderness, and finally — unexpectedly, inevitably — to love.

“Why,” says Mason, “it’s an ensemble piece!”

“Of course it is,” says Lucy contentedly. “It was based on a stage play.”

“It’s cute,” says Rufus judiciously, as the film concludes with the shop owner offering the newest messenger boy Christmas dinner. “Right up there with _Star Wars_ for quality banter.”

“Scruffy-looking nerf herder,” returns Jiya, half-sleepily. 

For the main feature, Lucy shifts to make room for Rufus on the couch, ends up on pillows in front of Flynn. The early scenes are soothing in their familiarity. And despite — or because of — the film’s implausibility, it does seem to lighten the mood. Wyatt confesses that his favorite character is Uncle Billy. Rufus sings along, sotto voce and surprisingly tunefully, to “Buffalo Gals”; Jiya extracts from him a promise to learn swing dancing. They all tease Mason for wincing when the phonograph record is broken. When George Bailey storms into his kitchen, raging and desperate, Lucy occupies herself pretty thoroughly with telling herself not to cry. It is just about the time that George prepares to throw the knob from the newel post that she suddenly — and far too late — realizes what is lying in wait for the assassin sitting behind her. She can’t demand that he get up and make room for her _now_. If she reached for his hand, she thinks, he might just leap backwards over the sofa like a startled cat. 

“Look, Daddy,” says Zuzu, tremulous and trusting. “Paste it.” 

Lucy is carefully not leaning against Flynn’s knee, and she can still feel him shudder. “Do you know,” she says, too loudly, too brightly, “Dorothy Parker worked on this script. So did Clifford Odets.”

“Shh,” comes from Wyatt and Jiya in unison. Then Lucy has to stifle a gasp as Flynn’s hands descend onto her shoulders. She wonders briefly if the others can hear her joints crack. She wonders if his fingers will leave bruises. His grip loosens, marginally, when George leaves his daughter’s bedroom; gradually, he begins what could pass for a massage, if one of the others glanced over — a compensation for her getting stuck on the floor, a simple thing. Of course, she thinks, it is nothing of the kind.

A restored family, a rejoicing community, and an orchestral crescendo — it is a strange vision to a group of people who routinely try, as desperately as Clarence, to prevent disaster. It taunts them with its perfection, too complete for reality. And yet, thinks Lucy, Mary’s face is still streaked with tears, and George’s coat is still soaked with snow. It isn’t magic that saves them; it’s forgiveness.

The film’s conclusion is followed by more or less surreptitious throat-clearings, murmured excuses as the assembled company drifts off to bed. Rufus practically pulls Jiya away, tugging a little at her hand. Unspoken is the knowledge that if they all stayed in the same room, something — or someone — would crack, and sorrow and anger and fear come spilling out, a viscous tide.

***

Lucy and Flynn have been assigned tree-trimming duties. (It turns out that the family customs of aggressively WASPy households and recent immigrants have a weird overlap where Christmas Eve rituals are concerned.)

“It’s a very nice tree,” says Lucy, because if she doesn’t say something, she might cry. 

“Mm.” Flynn sets the bowls down between them; he takes the cranberries, she gets the popcorn. “It’s very small.”

“Well, a larger one might have made you conspicuous.” It had been almost — no, definitely — comical, to see him returning from his illicit pre-dawn raid, smeared with dirt, smelling of loam, and all but brandishing their Christmas tree in one hand. Mason had rigged a stand for it while complaining about the lack of respect for his elaborate security systems. Now, it’s surrounded by half a dozen identical, squashy packages, labeled in handwriting so neat that Lucy suspects it’s Michelle’s. 

Lucy stabs the popcorn kernels viciously enough that several of them crumble. Gradually she modifies her technique, but she still grips too hard, and her hands still shake. When did this become her life? When did she become an orphan, bereft of her sister, celebrating (celebrating?) Christmas in a top-security bunker?

Flynn clears his throat. “I owe you an apology.”

“No you don’t.” For several minutes, they work in silence, but she can feel her own breathing steadying. It occurs to her to wonder why his companionship is so much like a more intimate form of solitude. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere tangled in their past, their future, an incomplete narrative constantly looping back on itself.

“You know,” says Flynn, with something cautious about the words, as though he is afraid of shattering the silence, or her, or himself, “we used to go to Midnight Mass.” Lucy does not have to ask who is meant by _we_. She moistens her lips, unsure if she should say something, or nothing. She dares to glance upward at him (even when they are both seated, it is a glance upward) and something twists inside her. Does he always look this exhausted, or is it something about the light, something about the quiet between them?

“We — ” says Flynn, and stops. For an instant, Lucy is afraid she has done the wrong thing — _no, go on, it’s all right_ — but he resumes. “Lorena loved it,” he says, more softly. “Not just the music, the candles… being there with other people. _Believing_ in it with other people. She was radiant.” Lucy has stopped trying to string the popcorn. 

“Iris,” says Flynn, “could never stay awake. She — I would take her on my shoulder, and carry her up when Lorena received Communion, and the priest would give her a blessing.” It’s a curiously vivid mental picture, Lucy finds: a small, sleeping child in her finery, incongruously cradled by a man who happens to look not unlike Mephistopheles, kneeling beside the woman who anchors him. She reaches over — tentatively, slowly enough that he could shift away without seeming to — and lays her hand lightly over his calf. He covers it with his own for a brief moment, just long enough for her to note that it is trembling, feverish. Lucy goes back to stringing popcorn.

“Amy and I,” she says, “had our own Christmas rituals. After the tree-trimming — ” she gestures demonstratively, wins a smile that is at least slightly more than a parody of itself — “we’d invariably be packed off to bed while Mom and Dad finished the presents. So we’d read Christmas stories to each other. Well, I’d read aloud. Later, she’d always want to read her own stories too… often as not she’d make them up.” Lucy takes a deep breath, ties off the knot on the end of her string. “In the morning,” she says, and swallows hard, “we’d sing. We — we weren’t allowed to wake our parents any other way. We’d stand on the stairs outside their bedroom, and we’d sing. We’d start off soft, you know… gradually working up to ‘Joy to the World!’” She stands up, a little stiffly. She tucks her popcorn string firmly around the back of the tree, begins winding it. It’s not as though he hasn’t seen her cry before. But she’s not sure she should make a habit of it. It frightens her a little, how easy it is to be defenseless with him.

“It sounds lovely,” says Flynn quietly behind her.

Lucy clears her throat vigorously, steps back from the tree. “It was,” she says; “it was.” She watches while he winds the cranberries, threading them through the branches with an unexpected delicacy. It seems almost a shame, to have a tree he so easily towers over, even when it’s standing on an ancient card table. Lucy hugs herself. They shouldn’t be underground, she thinks; they shouldn’t be underground, but somewhere looking at the sky, looking at the stars, breathing in the winter air like hope. 

He steps back to stand next to her, surveying their handiwork, and on impulse, Lucy begins to sing: “Silent night, holy night…” When she has reached _Sleep in heavenly peace_ , he joins her, and shock almost stops her breath. He stays with her for both subsequent verses, a gravelly baritone in a language she does not know, their untrained voices hallowing the silence.

“Merry Christmas, Lucy.” There is in his voice something more complicated than tenderness, more reverent than ardor.

“Merry Christmas,” she whispers. For an instant, in the dazzle of her own unshed tears, she can see all the stars over Bethlehem.

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you wondering, yes, Denise has made them all ugly scarves.


End file.
